identifying best practices in competition policy and antitrust enforcement;

promoting convergence among national antitrust policies; and

enhancing cooperation among competition agencies.

The FTC and DOJ’s Antitrust Division represent the United States in the OECD’s Competition Committee, and its semi-annual meetings attract senior officials from competition agencies of member countries and observers who discuss their experiences on key antitrust enforcement and policy issues. For example, the Committee has recently held roundtables on procedural fairness, generic pharmaceuticals, competition issues related to standard setting organizations, and fidelity rebates. At meetings this week, members will continue a discussion on the FTC-initiated topic of competition issues related to disruptive innovation. This time members chose to focus on the land transportation sector. The meetings also include the annual Global Forum on Competition, which typically attracts competition representatives from over 90 jurisdictions.

The Competition Committee’s flagship output is its Recommendations to member governments, which set a high standard of international best practice in competition policy and enforcement. These include Recommendations in the areas of merger notification and review and anti-cartel enforcement. The FTC recently played a lead role in updating the OECD’s Recommendation on International Cooperation, which has been influential in encouraging increased cooperation among competition authorities from both member and non-member countries.

Through participation in the Committee’s peer reviews, members use their experience to suggest areas for possible improvement to their colleagues’ competition systems. For example, as a lead examiner during Brazil’s peer review, the FTC suggested merger reforms including the adoption of a pre-merger notification regime with clear notification thresholds and review timetables. Over time, many of these and other recommendations have been adopted by the recipients, largely due to the OECD’s credibility. At this week’s meetings, members will conduct a peer review of Ukraine’s competition regime, with Chairwoman Ramirez as the lead examiner on institutional and merger control issues.

Since 1962, U.S. participation through the FTC and DOJ in the OECD’s Competition Committee has helped promote international antitrust enforcement cooperation, convergence of competition policies that affect U.S. and global business and trade, and sound antitrust enforcement, benefitting U.S. and international consumers and companies. This work complements the FTC’s activities in the International Competition Network (ICN) and other international competition fora and in its direct engagement with its counterparts around the world.

Comments

Pages

Add new comment

Privacy Act Statement

It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system (PDF), and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system (PDF). We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.